Amittai Axelrod

I've moved!

As of September 2014, I am a postdoc at the University of Maryland, in the Institvte for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

Hullo!
The core problem I'm interested in working on is that of using existing
resources effectively. My primary field is statistical machine
translation: building statistical systems to automatically translate
text from one human language to another.

I am particularly interested in systems that are task-oriented: travel
scenarios, real-time telephone conversations, or particular kinds of
documents. These tasks have an implicit distribution of language or
linguistic features that differ from the language as a whole. My work
quantifies how these distributions are different, and then leverages
that difference to build better task-oriented translation systems.
The idea is generalizable: Given a natural language processing
task, one could use these methods to identify the most relevant data
available, and then train a task-specific system.

I defended my dissertation ("Data Selection Methods for Statistical Machine Translation") at the University of Washington in June 2014. I was advised
by Xiaodong
He at Microsoft Research, and by
Mari Ostendorf
in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of
Washington.

During my second internship at Microsoft Research, I wrote what
appears to have been the first step-by-step guide to compiling and
installing the Moses MT framework on a Windows machine:
Moses on Win7 (last updated 15 July 2011)
The guide is now out-of-date, as Moses has been updated to install
smoothly out-of-the-box on Windows, but it's an example of how I document things.